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1. Introduction
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have imposed social distancing and wearing a mask in public to prevent the widespread of the coronavirus (Qian and Jiang, 2020). Furthermore, many Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have also implemented lockdowns, resulting in many restaurants could not survive because customers could not dine in (Gursoy and Chi, 2020). For this reason, many restaurants have been forced to offer contactless services such as online food delivery (OFD) services to stay alive during the COVID-19 pandemic (Pandey et al., 2021). For instance, Statista (2021) reported that the global OFD market size had reached $111.32bn in 2020 and is expected to grow further. In addition, it is expected that fewer people will be dining in-house. Furthermore, the USA has the fastest growth rate of 123% in the OFD industry, followed by Russia and Canada (Statista, 2021). The China-based Meituan Waimai is one of the top OFD service providers, with revenue approaching $14bn in 2020.
With the new social norms of social isolation and staying at home, there is a growing demand for OFD services worldwide (Ramos, 2021), especially in Malaysia, the context of the study (Allah Pitchay et al., 2021). It was reported that 38% of new OFD users began using OFD after the Malaysian government imposed movement control, resulting in a 61% increase in OFD customers (Vodus, 2021). To help small businesses weather the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sarawak government has helped small businesses to digitise their operations by linking them to OFD services (News Sarawak Tribune, 2020) such as Foodpanda, GrabFood, Meal2U and SmartBite. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the OFD industry has become very lucrative, thereby attracting many new OFD service providers in the industry (Ramli et al., 2021). Hence, providing good service quality is crucial to gain a competitive advantage (Zhuang et al., 2021).
Extant studies have been conducted to understand factors influencing consumers' satisfaction towards and continuous intention to use OFD services (Alalwan, 2020; Cai and Leung, 2020; Cho et al., 2019; Kang and Namkung, 2019; Pandey et al., 2021; Roh and Park, 2019; Shah et al., 2020; Suhartanto et al., 2019; Troise et al., 2021; Wen et al.